Memphis is in desperation mode
You thought SMU's move to the ACC was crazy? Hold onto your butts
It’s no secret that every Group of Six school wants to move to the Power Four ranks. Especially with revenue sharing, a wide open playoff and potential super leagues on the horizon. Realignment isn’t just for now, it’s jockeying for schools’ futures.
We saw it pay off in a big way with SMU’s move to the ACC. The Mustangs bet on themselves to get into a power conference, then shocked everyone to race to a conference championship berth and a spot in the first 12-team College Football Playoff.
Now, the Ponies got eviscerated by Penn State, but that’s besides the point. The bet paid off, at least, early returns have more than paid for the lost revenue.
SMU’s bet was a grand one: forgoing any media money for nine seasons. Hey, when you’re the program that was literally put to the sword for paying players in the 1980’s, making it so the NCAA fears using its strongest enforcement arm, the “Death Penalty,” you can afford to do that. But Memphis?
Somehow, my friends, this gets even wilder.
We’re begging you
That the PAC-12 (or PAC-8 for football, or my preferred PAC-St8) was courting Memphis to be its necessary eighth football member was an open secret. In fact, the league sent a formal offer over to Memphis to pry the Tigers from their American home, but athletic director Ed Scott turned them down.
That didn’t mean the Tigers were happy in their conference home, though. They just didn’t see the move to the PAC-12 providing any benefit to them other than long travel times and a few millions extra in television revenue each year - in other words, more headaches and chump change to account for it.
It made sense for football on the surface, but those travel times would be a killer. Still, Scott did his due diligence, trying something a lot of people online are championing: sending their football team to a different conference than the rest of their sports. That leads to a dalliance with the Big East, which amounted to nothing.
Scott wasn’t done, though. He still wanted to find a conference home.
Scott and the rest of his team went to work cooking up a plan. In the middle of America, situated right on the Mississippi River in western Tennessee, there wasn’t really a big geographic fit in the PAC, plus the revenue would never work out. It’s not exactly on the Atlantic coast, but neither are SMU, California or Stanford, right? Still, the ACC just didn’t feel right. The Big Ten and SEC would sneer at any mention of the Tigers.
That leaves one power conference: the Big 12.
It was the only conference that made sense. The one that could solve all their problems. The answer to their questions.
They had to get it right. So Memphis put together the most aggressive offer we’ve ever seen.
According to Yahoo! Sports’s Ross Dellenger, the Tigers wanted to take the SMU model further. Like SMU, Memphis would forgo any media revenue in their new conference home for five years. They also included an out in the deal where, if after four years Memphis isn’t up to snuff, the Big 12 could kick them out with no penalty.
But wait, it get wilder. Scott and university president Bill Hardgrave went around to the Fortune 500 companies that call the Memphis area home and got deals. $200 million worth of sponsorships for the Big 12 conference. All they had to do was give Memphis a seat at the table.
And that’s not as farfetched an idea as you’d think. After some rough sledding, the Tiger football program has stabilized the past few seasons under Ryan Silverfield as a threat to the Group of Six playoff spot. Their basketball team, led by Penny Hardaway, has brought in plenty of big-name recruits and have reached the NCAA tournament in three of the past four years. Their athletic department is one of the few in the Group of Six operating in the green.
And the Big 12 turned it down. Worse. They laughed at it.
Not a fit
Before we get into the why, it’s important to note one little tidbit of expansion-related red tape: the Big 12 requires a supermajority of league presidents to extend an offer to a new school. That’s 12 of the 16 presidents for those counting at home.
Getting a supermajority is hard in anything, but bringing a quarter of a billion dollars to the table and giving the conference an out has to be intriguing, right? Dellenger reported Memphis wanted to make this offer virtually no-risk to the Big 12, and I feel like they accomplished that.
Still, there is risk.
For one, Memphis doesn’t have a huge athletic tradition to lean on. Their men’s basketball team is their biggest draw, which is a fit for how the Big 12 is positioning themselves. But hey, what about that Final Four run and the glory years with John Calipari, my basketball-inclined friends may ask? Vacated due to NCAA sanctions. Even more basketball ball-knowers may ask about the 1985 Final Four run? Vacated due to NCAA sanctions. Surely the on-court product of Memphis under Penny Hardaway is improving with all those NCAA tournament appearances? They just got placed on probation last week.
Football hasn’t incurred the same violation wrath, but it’s clear that Memphis has the proclivity to, shall we say, bend the rules. Anytime the Tigers have achieved nation-wide success, the NCAA’s enforcement arm follows and snatches it away. Bringing on a brand like that has serious risk for a conference.
But that’s not all that’s weighing on the minds of the Big 12 presidents. You see, their last round of expansion to weather the Oklahoma and Texas departures also came from the American. And adding Cincinnati, Houston and UCF hasn’t really produced many results, outside of Houston’s men’s basketball team competing for national titles.
Cincinnati has done nothing across the board. UCF was an intruiging team with success and a decent head coach in Gus Malzahn, and did nothing. Houston has been one of the worst Power Four football programs since joining the Big 12. Do you really want to take a chance on another American team watering down your product?
Setting off a cannon
Either way, you have to admire the risk Memphis took in presenting this offer to the Big 12. Five years with no revenue. $200 million in sponsorships. An out four years in. They’re basically throwing their checkbook on the table and asking Brett Yormark “how much is it going to cost?”
There’s a reason Memphis wasn’t offered a spot when the other three American schools got invites to the Big 12. And since then, nothing has changed since some fundraising.
But make no mistake, once Memphis makes a move, the next wave of realigment is underway.
Already, there are other schools orchestrating multi-year plans to get into bigger conferences like Memphis. Sacramento State has their push to get to the FBS and the PAC-12. That’s been derailed by the NCAA denying their waiver to move to the FBS from FCS as an independent.
UNLV apparently also has their eyes set on the Big 12 after turning their nose up at the PAC-12. But, like Memphis, the Rebels have a history of run-ins with the NCAA’s enforcement arm.
Unquestionably, Memphis is the strongest Group of Six brand there is. Their sports can budget like a Power Four school based on massive donations. They already compete for high level recruits. Playoff and NCAA tournament bids are expected. But they’re also the headliner of the American.
Could the American get raided again? Sure, they banded together in the face of the PAC-12’s expansion efforts, but, like Scott said, there isn’t much in the way of money that would change their minds. If the Big 12 came calling for a Tulane, a Memphis? You bet they’d listen.
Other high-positioned schools like those in the Sun Belt, or Liberty that outpaces their entire conference in the CUSA could then jump. The American would need to backfill. Then CUSA or the Sun Belt or, God forbid, the MAC would have to backfill. You’ve got a whole other realignment cycle.
All because Memphis decided to pony up big time cash.
Will we see more school take bets like this? No, because they can’t afford it. SMU was able to pull it off in the ACC because oil money runs deep and their donors have some of the deepest pockets across the nation. Having board of trustee members leading Lowe’s and FedEx and AutoZone in Memphis can help offset those costs. Liberty has seemingly the entire non-Catholic Christian world backing them with a massive budget buoyed by astronomical online enrollment.
Those three could pull it off. Maybe a private institution like Tulane could, but we don’t have access to their budgets or donation amounts. That leaves maybe four schools that could pull this off.
It’s not going to be a running theme. But the desperation is. Because the college athletics landscape is changing and nobody wants to be the next Oregon State or Washington State and be left behind.
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